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A good wife and a shady reputation can be worth a lot of
money. You could ask almost any number of Washington
pols, beginning with Bill Clinton.

The former president and the
former first lady - still a lady but
no longer the first among them -
filed their financial disclosure forms
last week and the figures don't lie.
They're rolling in dough.

The Hot Springs flash made
$9.2 mil doing what he does best,
listening to himself talk, sometimes
getting $350,000 a pop for it, and
rarely less than a quarter of a mil.
Miss Hillary earned, or at least
received, $2.85 mil, as part of the
advance for her memoirs, due in
the bookstores next year. The
president has a contract guaranteeing him $10 million in
advance for his book, also due next year. It's not clear how
much of that advance he got last year, since he didn't have to
say. Neither is it clear how he can talk as much as he does
and deliver a book, too, since writing, unlike talking, is a
harsh and demanding discipline.

However they got it, it's a lot of money, and it made a lot
of the front pages because the nation is still semi-obsessed
with the Clintons, the scab on the body politic that we can't
resist picking at.

Mr. Clinton made a lot of his speechifying in Asia, where
ex-heads of state retain their currency longer than they usually
do elsewhere, even ex-heads of state from obscure republics
and even if they have to be wheeled on stage in iron lungs to
say a few words in an unintelligible foreign tongue. Live ones,
like Bill Clinton, are golden, and they don't have to say much.

In fact, not much is exactly what Mr. Clinton had to say in
a recent speech to a Chinese real-estate seminar in Shanghai,
for which he was paid $350,000. He spoke for about 20
minutes and then, as is the custom, agreed to take a few
questions. He didn't have many answers beyond, "I'm not up
to date on that one." His hosts were said to be disappointed,
but getting themselves photographed with him no doubt
assuaged their feelings. Such photographs with foreign
political celebrities, like speeches, are highly prized as
currency, presumably making the photographee a surrogate
big shot.

Mr. Clinton made a nice haul in Tokyo, too, getting
$450,000 for three days of schmoozing with executives and
guests of a Japanese vitamin manufacturer, and $400,000 for
three speeches in three days to a Jewish philanthropy in
Scotland.

Nevertheless, there's no arguing with his spokesman, who
boasted that he's the most requested speaker on the
international lecture circuit, or that he could be booked every
day for the next three or four years. (This may be what the
publisher waiting for his manuscript is afraid of.)

Cashing in on celebrity could be the best perk of the
presidency. Ronald Reagan was famously paid $2 million for
two speeches in Japan after he left the White House, and
President George H.W. Bush - "41," as he's called at the
current White House - once took his fee for a speech in
Japan in shares in a telecommunications company that
eventually were worth $14 million, though it is not known
when or whether he sold the stock.

(Full disclosure here: The
former president and his wife, Barbara, were paid a bundle
by the Washington Times Foundation, which is wholly
separate from the newspaper, for a series of speeches they
made to groups of visiting Japanese women. I introduced
them on several of those occasions, and once received a nice
doughnut, glazed as I recall, and a cup of coffee in the Green
Room, where I also had a nice chat with the actress Shirley
Jones.)

Wives can offer a valuable hand in raking in the family
cash, and their husbands' connections don't hurt. The wife of
Tom Daschle, the Democratic majority leader in the Senate,
is a lobbyist for defense contractors, and Hadassah
Lieberman, wife of the senator from Connecticut, earned
$328,000 last year for her speeches, mostly to Jewish
groups. John Kerry, the senator from Massachusetts who is
presumed to be a candidate for the Democratic presidential
nomination in '04, even lumps his assets with those of his
wife, Teresa Heinz, heir to the ketchup fortune.

Still, it's a far, far better thing to be an ex-president, and
best of all to be a hot ham. That's when you attract a lot of
ketchup.